The Devil's Workshop

Michael Fitzgerald sorts through a number of studies on the economic effects of religion:

Among the most provocative findings
have come from Robert Barro, a renowned economist at Harvard, and his
wife, Rachel McCleary, a researcher at Harvard’s Taubman Center. [...] The
two collected data from 59 countries where a majority of the population
followed one of the four major religions, Christianity, Islam,
Hinduism, or Buddhism. They ran this data - which covered slices of
years from 1981 to 2000, measuring things like levels of belief in God,
afterlife beliefs, and worship attendance - through statistical models. Their results show a strong correlation between economic growth and
certain shifts in beliefs, though only in developing countries.

Most
strikingly, if belief in hell jumps up sharply while actual church
attendance stays flat, it correlates with economic growth. Belief in
heaven also has a similar effect, though less pronounced. Mere belief
in God has no effect one way or the other. Meanwhile, if church
attendance actually rises, it slows growth in developing economies.

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